God Chooses Mercy--January 24, 2025

God Chooses Mercy--January 24, 2025

"And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
    to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,
    and to be his servants,
all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it,
    and hold fast my covenant--
these I will bring to my holy mountain,
    and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
    will be accepted on my altar;
for my house shall be called a house of prayer 

    for all peoples.
Thus says the Lord GOD,
    who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
I will gather others to them
    besides those already gathered." (Isaiah 56:6-8)

Just when you think you've got God figured out and pinned down, God squirms out from underneath your grip and makes a move you didn't see coming.

Just when you are confident you have a final version of the list of who's allowed "in" and who is "out"--written in permanent marker, or even chiseled in stone--God stretches the welcome wider and sends out more engraved invitations.

Just when you are certain God will insist that the "outcasts" stay cast out ("They might be dangerous, and they're not OUR KIND of people, you know..."), God chooses mercy and gathers those outsiders all in.

That's God for you--consistently pushing us beyond our comfort zones because God has a thing for strays, rejects, and refugees.  Including you and me.

These words from the book of the prophet Isaiah are just one passage of many in the Bible that remind us of God's bewildering (and beautiful) habit of choosing to include people who had reason to believe they would be left out.  And as we consider them on this day, it's worth remembering that these words would have been a challenge for many in Isaiah's audience to hear, because accepting them meant moving beyond what they were familiar with, and it meant accepting that God could widen the circle with or without their permission.

This section of the book of Isaiah addresses folks who are picking up the pieces after exile.  They were coming back home to their ancestral lands after a generation before them had been forcibly taken into exile.  They and their parents had learned in Babylon what it was like to be the foreigners who were looked down on and treated with suspicion.  They had felt the glares from the citizens of the superpower of the day, and they knew what it was like to be mistreated there in a strange country. 

But once those exiled people finally came home to their ancestral lands in Judah, they had to deal with the new fact that there were others--foreigners--in the picture now, too.  Some were people who had married into the family, and others had been transplanted to live in Judah when it was occupied territory under the Babylonians.  And for the Judeans home from exile, they were pretty sure the old rules said that no foreigners were allowed to belong in the assembly of God's people, no matter how they had gotten there or how long they had lived there in Judah.  Rules are rules, right?

Well, except that God--as you may have heard before--reserves the right to surprise us by gathering the outcasts in.  In fact, that's exactly what God says in this passage of Isaiah 56. This whole section is the prophet speaking for God and saying specifically to the foreigners who find themselves living in the land of Judah that they are now able to be included among the servants of God and the covenant people.  God is well aware that the conventional wisdom was that no foreigners--that is, no non-Israelites or people of Judah--could belong among the people of God.  And God is surely also aware that some of those Israelites wanted to get the foreigners out altogether (you can read that perspective in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah).  That group saw all foreigners as a danger and even wanted people who had married people of foreign ancestry to leave their spouses--or rather make their spouses leave!  Again, you can read that whole episode in places like Ezra 10, where the people with foreign wives and children were told to send their whole families away.  But... over against that perspective, the prophet here in Isaiah 56 says, "No! They don't have to leave! They can belong!" People from whatever background or nationality or ethnicity could belong among God's people, provided that they were willing to live the covenant way of life--to do justice, to practice mercy, to keep God's ways, including the rhythm of sabbath rest which was unique to the heritage of Israel and Judah.  In other words, the voice here in Isaiah 56 says that all those people who would have been sent away, even separated from their families, can be welcomed into the covenant and belong as God's people.  God chooses mercy, rather than sending them away.  God chooses to gather the outcast foreigners in, alongside the Israelites who had been outcasts in exile and come back home.

Now, this announcement from the prophet would have been obviously good news if you were one of those foreigners living in Judah and were wondering if there was a place for you among God's people.  This would have meant that you were no longer an outcast and no longer cut off from God.  It would have meant that you were welcomed into the Temple, too, which was now to be understood as "a house of prayer for all peoples" rather than the exclusive possession of one group.  But if you were one of those returned exiles, this was all very, very challenging.  This was about as far out of your comfort zones as you could imagine, not only because it meant accepting that God was doing a new thing, but also because it meant that you were going to have to make room to accept and welcome these foreigners as your own neighbors (which they were already, after all) because God had decided to include them.  And for the returned exiles, it also meant the uncomfortable recognition that they had been outcast foreigners before, too--back in Babylon, of course, and farther back when their ancestors had been the oppressed foreigners held as slaves in Egypt.  And it was difficult for many of them to accept that since God had gathered them in, God was also free to choose to gather in other people who were foreigners and welcome them into the covenant people.

For every voice in Isaiah's day who said, "But we're different!  Those people shouldn't belong with us!" the prophet said, in effect, "Sorry--you're both people who were outsiders and outcasts... but good news! I have chosen to show mercy to both groups!" We often have a hard time, don't we, with the realization that when God chooses to be gracious to us, God reserves the right to be gracious to other people we were not prepared to welcome?  But that's how things work in the sweep of Scripture.  God gathered the people who were foreigners in Babylon back home when they were outcast, and so God could gather in the foreigners living among the Israelites once they got back home, too.  Nobody had to be sent away.  Nobody had to be a permanent outsider.  Nobody had to be separated from their families, the prophet said. And all of this welcome was possible because God chose mercy.

It is possible, even now, even on this day, for us to choose mercy, too.  It is possible for us to see that we were once outcasts, strangers, and foreigners from the ways of God and that we have been welcomed in, and that therefore others could be welcomed in as well.  It is possible for us to choose surprising welcome.  After all, God does it all the time.

Lord God, you who have first mercifully gathered us to belong to your people, grant us the courage to show mercy to those waiting for welcome today, too.